Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944

Goerdeler got his passport back from an unexpected source – Hermann Göring. Göring, who was in charge of the German rearmament programme at the time, was becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of a future war. Cleverly playing on this (and probably also on Göring’s desire to build up his own private information network) Goerdeler proposed that he should undertake a foreign tour, and report back on opinion in Western capitals. Göring jumped at the idea, arranging for the return of Goerdeler’s passport and instructing his new emissary as they parted that he should always remember on his travels to conduct himself ‘as a patriot’.

The would-be wanderer left Berlin on 3 June 1937, at the beginning of a series of foreign trips which over the next two years would take him to Belgium, Britain (twice), Holland, France (twice), Canada, the USA, Switzerland (twice), Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.

His message was always the same. Hitler was evil; his government had done evil things, and would do many more; he had neither moral restraint nor human scruple; his aim was war, and if he was left unchallenged, war would be inevitable. The only way to avoid this was for the Western powers to be firm in opposing him – ‘call black, black and white, white’ as he put it. Any equivocation or appeasement would be regarded by Hitler as weakness, and would further inflame his megalomania. If standing firm against Hitler was the policy of the Western powers, Goerdeler promised, he and his friends would get rid of him from inside Germany – even at risk of their lives.

It must have been startling for the quiet English gentlemen sitting around the dining table in the comforting normality of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall to realise that they were being warned of an impending putsch designed to remove Hitler and change the government of Germany.

Standing in the darkness on the pavement outside the club after they had waved their guest goodbye in a London taxi, one of the company said to their host, ‘He has decided with commendable courage to go forth and fearlessly condemn the Hitler regime, regardless of what the personal consequences may be’.

Goerdeler’s fellow diners that night were not in themselves in any way remarkable. They consisted of an ex-World War I fighter pilot, an industrialist, a renowned German educationalist and a middle-ranking civil servant. They had been brought together for the occasion by Arthur Primrose Young. Young (he preferred to be known as ‘A.P.’, in preference to anything which included Primrose) was a senior industrialist and a member of a small group who acted as occasional gatherers of intelligence for Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office and close adviser to Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. Every word that was said that night would be reported back. Vansittart was the invisible seventh diner at the table on this ordinary July evening in 1937.

Most permanent under secretaries at the British Foreign Office are unobtrusive, background men, whose voices are seldom heard. But Sir Robert Vansittart – widely known in Whitehall as ‘Van’ – was different. Knowledgeable, clever and very well informed, he was so influential over Eden that the foreign secretary was often maliciously referred to behind his back as ‘His Master’s Voice’ – the point of the barb being that ‘Van’ was the foreign secretary’s master, not the other way round.

Vansittart was, in short, anything but quiet and unobtrusive. His frequently-voiced concerns about the rise of Hitler were so contrary to the appeasement policy of His Majesty’s Government of the time that one of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s close advisers referred to him as ‘an alarmist, [who] hampered all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states’.

A few days later, Goerdeler had a meeting with Vansittart, no doubt as a result of Young’s report on the National Liberal Club dinner. Afterwards, Van wrote a memorandum to Eden for circulation to the cabinet. In it he underlined Goerdeler’s warnings, referring to the visiting German as ‘an impressive, wise and weighty man [who by coming to Britain is] putting his neck in a halter’.

Vansittart’s minute got no further than Eden’s desk. It did not accord with the prevailing government policy of appeasement, and would therefore, the foreign secretary judged, not be welcomed by his cabinet colleagues.

The minute still exists in Van’s private papers. On it, in Vansittart’s hand, are written the words: ‘Suppressed by Eden’.

2

Ludwig Beck

If there was a soldier in the German army who embodied the antithesis of all that Hitler and the Nazi Party stood for, it was Ludwig Beck.

And yet, he was not one of life’s natural rebels. He was too intellectual, too thoughtful, too careful, too considered and too punctilious (that word again) to be a great plotter – and far too straightforward to be a successful conspirator.

And that was his problem. Like Carl Goerdeler, Ludwig Beck was a man made for a different age than the one in which he found himself.

Also like Goerdeler, Beck at first welcomed the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis on the German scene. In the autumn of 1930 he famously defended young officers in his unit who were court-martialled for being members of the Nazi Party, contrary to the rules of the time which prohibited army officers from political activity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Beck, whose Lutheran faith had incorporated a degree of anti-Semitism since the days of Luther himself, announced, ‘I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.’

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was born the son of a gifted metallurgical engineer on 29 June 1880 in Biebrich, then a small village on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Mainz. As a middle-class Prussian brought up in the long afterglow of the victories of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing unification of Germany, and living little more than a stone’s throw from Frankfurt, where the treaty which sealed these triumphs was signed, the young Beck’s career would probably have been decided from the moment he was born – he was to be a soldier.

What followed was an education in the classic Prussian military tradition. This produced officers of high professional ability, who regarded a commitment to their country as synonymous with loyalty to their regiment and to the brotherhood of their fellow officers. For these men the Prussian military code, characterised by the motto Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit* (Always practise loyalty and sincerity), was more than a slogan – it was a way of life that they were sworn to follow and protect. Later this sense of loyalty and brotherly solidarity among the officer corps would protect even plotters against the German state from discovery by the security services.

Ludwig Beck’s moral compass, founded on Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit, was different from that of Carl Goerdeler – but its pull was no less strong.

Tall, angular, thin, Beck’s physical appearance closely mirrored his personality. He had the look of an ascetic, with what one colleague described as ‘facial skin so tight as to seem ghoulish, especially on the rare occasions when he smiled’. Another noted his ‘tense, sensitive, finely chiselled face with slightly sunken, rather sad eyes’. To his contemporaries Beck seemed a solitary figure, set slightly apart from the crowd, as though close human contact was strange and uncongenial to him. A committed and practising Lutheran, for Beck, austerity, rectitude and restraint were the guiding principles of his life and the cornerstone of his religious beliefs.

Beck the young officer was no moustachioed, boneheaded Prussian militarist of the sort beloved of cartoonists and popular legend. He was what was known in the Germany of the time as an ‘educated officer’. Like Frederick the Great he was keen on music, and played the violin well. Widely read, knowledgeable and engaged in all aspects of German cultural life, he was fluent in English, an admirer of French culture and, unlike most in the Prussian officer class, engaged freely with politicians. Intellectually disciplined, he was widely recognised as a man of refinement and integrity; in later life he would earn the nickname ‘the philosopher general’.

But Ludwig Beck had his flaws too – they were the flaws which can often weaken the soldier who has more intellect than is needed for the job. He was a man of thought rather than of action, who weighed every step so carefully that he could sometimes miss the fleeting opportunity whose lightning exploitation is the true test of the great commander. One contemporary put it more prosaically: ‘Everyone who knew him, knew he could not be persuaded into a cavalry charge.’ Men looked up to Beck not for his battle-readiness, but for his deep spiritual and intellectual qualities, and for his unshakeable integrity.

Ludwig Beck

By the time the First World War came, Ludwig Beck was an experienced thirty-four-year-old professional soldier, widely regarded as a man on the way up. He spent most of the first three years of the war as a staff officer on the Western Front, earning a reputation for diligence and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. He worked such long hours at the front that he was forced to give up his beloved violin. In May 1916 he took a few days’ leave from the front to marry Amalie Pagenstecher, the daughter of a Bremen merchant and, at twenty-three, twelve years Beck’s junior. Nine months later the couple had a daughter, Gertrud. Then, in November 1917, tragedy struck when Amalie suddenly died. Beck arranged for Gertrud’s care and swiftly returned to his duties at the front line. After the war ended he took over his daughter’s upbringing himself, throwing himself into the task with typical dedication and energy.

A period commanding an artillery regiment in present-day Baden-Württemberg followed, before Beck was posted to the Department of the Army in Berlin in 1931. He arrived in the capital just in time to have a ringside seat for the final stages of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Beck’s job was to lead a team tasked with producing the German army’s new operations manual, the Truppenführung, which first appeared in 1933. A modified version of this widely acclaimed work is still in use in the German Federal Army of today. In 1932 Beck was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, he was made head of the army department. By this time the army department had effectively become the German general staff, despite an explicit prohibition against the creation of such an organisation in the Versailles Treaty. Beck threw himself into his new task with his usual ferocious energy. He rose each morning at 5.30 and rode from six to eight, before being driven to army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse at 8.30. He worked in his office overlooking the courtyard from 9 a.m. until seven in the evening, when he returned home to dine. After dinner he did paperwork for a further three hours, before retiring to bed punctually at midnight.

These long hours were not spent only on military matters. By this stage of his life Beck was fully engaged in his second great love – politics.

It did not take him long to realise that his hope that Hitler would be a necessary and passing evil after the chaos of the Weimar years was to be confounded. Like Goerdeler and many others, Beck and his army colleagues were horrified by the lawlessness and bloodletting of the Night of the Long Knives, especially when one of the army’s own, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, and his wife were cold-bloodedly murdered in their home.

Three weeks later, an attempted putsch by Austrian Nazis to overthrow their government, in which Hitler’s hand was clearly visible, failed disastrously.

To Beck, who had close contacts in the German Foreign Office, the failed coup confirmed what he had feared for some time: that the long-term consequence – and probably intent – of Hitler’s foreign policy was war. Shortly afterwards, he wrote a memo to his superiors warning that premature foreign adventures would ultimately result in a ‘humiliating retreat’.

Beck, however, went further than predictions. Basing his arguments on religious and moral convictions similar to those of Goerdeler, he asserted, in a way that foreshadows the Nuremberg trials of more than a decade later, that legitimate action by the state and its servants in the army had to be based on morality. To prevent modern conflict becoming total war, he wrote, what was needed was ‘a policy with moral bases which knows to retain its supremacy on the foundation of a new moral idealism in the state itself and in its relations with other nations’. It goes without saying that if such a moral context for state policy and action was what Beck hoped for, he must have known that it could never be found in Hitler and his associates.

On 2 August 1934, a month after the Night of the Long Knives, the death occurred of the eighty-six-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg, the only person whose status and position could act as a counterbalance to Hitler’s growing command of the German state. A little over two weeks later, in a referendum called the day before the old president’s death, 89.9 per cent of Germans voted to combine the offices of president and chancellor, conferring absolute power on Adolf Hitler. All civil servants and members of the armed forces were now required to attend mass rallies and swear an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler (rather than, as previously to ‘the People and Fatherland’): ‘I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath.’ Beck, who claimed to have been unaware of the full form of the oath until he arrived at the ceremony, declared to a friend afterwards, ‘This the blackest day of my life.’ Later, in a classic Beck afterthought, he confided to another, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that he ‘could never rid himself of the awful thought that at the time he should not, perhaps, have given his oath’.

Very few felt as Beck did. The average officer in the Wehrmacht was delighted by the new mood of militarism in Germany, by the respect the army appeared to receive from Hitler and by the physical consequence of this: increased budgets for the latest arms and equipment, and a massive expansion in numbers. True, some were concerned that the flood of new recruits – especially members of the Hitler Youth, for whom the notion of Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit was as alien as it was quaint – would alter the nature of the German army. Most officers consoled themselves with the thought that the army would change the newcomers before they changed the army; and anyway, since the man to whom they had just sworn absolute fealty clearly needed them, what had they to fear?

Beck was one of very few who understood that the imposition of Hitler’s Führerprinzip (the leader principle), with its demand for absolute obedience, meant the destruction of the normal checks and balances of a democratic state. His answer to this threat was for the army, as Germany’s strongest and most revered institution, to play its role as the essential counterweight needed to keep the state on a safe course. In a normal democratic state, he suggested, military action was tasked and constrained by the political leaders. But if this balance was broken or dysfunctional, the roles should be reversed, and it should become the responsibility of the army to set its own limits for the politicians. ‘It is not what we do,’ he wrote to one of his subordinates in 1935, ‘but how we do it which is so bad. [It is a] policy of violence and perfidy.’ National confidence in Germany’s most illustrious arm, its military, depended, Beck asserted, on the army’s refusal to allow itself to be used as the tool of a foreign policy built on naked adventurism. The army, in short, had a duty to act as the emergency brake on political folly or evil.

Beck was now on territory which was dangerously close to rebellion. Writing to his superior Werner von Fritsch in January 1937, he insisted, ‘All hope is placed in the army. The Wehrmacht will never permit adventure – for able and clever men are its head. Total responsibility rests [on us] for future developments. There is no escaping that.’

It did not take long for Beck to be cruelly disabused of these elaborate niceties.

Hitler’s long-term intentions had for some time been strongly hinted at for those with ears to hear. As early as May 1935, Beck, as chief of staff, had been ordered to start planning for Operation Schulung, an ‘imaginary’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the first months of 1937, responding to the mood in Hitler’s Chancellery, Beck began considering how he would implement an order to bring Austria into the German fold.

On 5 November 1937, Hitler finally made plain what had so far only been implied. In a long monologue delivered at a secret meeting with his key military leaders, the chancellor announced that his intention was indeed to go to war with his neighbours: ‘The first German objective … should be to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously … the descent upon the Czechs [should be carried out] with lightning speed [and might take place] as early as 1938.’ Hitler stressed that he was not predicting a short conflict – his long-term aim, he warned, was to acquire more ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for Germany’s population by 1943.

Any hope that the army would act as Beck’s hoped-for ‘emergency brake’ on what was now plainly revealed as Hitler’s headlong dash to war vanished in the early months of 1938, when the German army suffered a double blow to both its prestige and its power. It began with a carefully engineered ‘scandal’ which on 27 January ended the career of the then minister of war and commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Eight days later the head of the army, Colonel General Fritsch, the man to whom Beck had written a few weeks earlier asserting that the army would never permit ‘adventure’, was forced to resign because of an alleged, but entirely manufactured, homosexual encounter with a male prostitute in a backstreet close to a Berlin railway station. The army, in which Beck had invested ‘all hope’, stood silently by and uttered not a squeak of protest at these public crucifixions of two of its most respected officers, or at the step-by-step emasculation of its power and position which ensued. On 4 February, Hitler, seeing this weakness, seized direct personal control of Germany’s military machine, declaring, ‘I exercise henceforth immediate command over the entire armed forces.’

Following the Fritsch affair and Hitler’s takeover of the army, whispered talk began to circulate about the possibilities of taking direct action. Carl Goerdeler lobbied some generals to initiate a coup d’état by using the army to seize Gestapo headquarters. But Ludwig Beck had not yet crossed the Rubicon. Asked at a meeting about this time if he had any comment on the recent events, he responded that the question was improper: ‘Mutiny and revolution are words which will not be found in a German soldier’s dictionary.’

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Beck, still failing to understand the true nature of Hitler’s demonic will, continued to believe that he could divert the coming war by persuasion and legal means.

Again, he was soon proved wrong.

Hitler swiftly consolidated his mastery of the German machine by appointing his most loyal acolyte, Wilhelm Keitel, as chief of the newly created high command of the armed forces, and Joachim von Ribbentrop as his new foreign minister. Then, following the annexation of Austria in March, he convened a secret meeting with his generals on 30 May, and proclaimed: ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.’

For Beck, this was the last straw. In a minute to his superior, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, he wrote: ‘The Führer’s remarks demonstrate once again the total insufficiency of the existing military hierarchy at the highest level … If the lever is not applied here soon … the future fate … [of] peace and war and with it the fate of Germany … can only be seen in the blackest colours.’

Now at last Ludwig Beck understood that all attempts to alter Hitler’s ‘unalterable resolve’ were in vain. If war was to be prevented, the time had come, the philosopher general concluded, to pass from protests to the preparation of coups and assassinations.

* The motto is taken from a song of this title that from 1797 to 1945 was played every hour by the bells of Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the burial place of Frederick the Great. The words, by the eighteenth-century poet Ludwig Hölty, were set to the tune of Papageno’s song ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The motto became closely associated with Prussian values and the creed of Freemasonry.

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